Human remains found last year in Virginia have been identified as a 5-year-old boy who went missing in 2003 – and police expect charges will be brought soon.
Logan Bowman was 5 years old when he disappeared in January 2003 from his home in Grayson County, Virginia, People Magazine reported. Nearly 20 years later, on September 6, 2022, a man called authorities to report that he had found human remains in a wooded area on the property he had bought in Galax, Virginia. The man who had brought the property was from out of town, WSLS reported, and sheriff’s deputies arrived to find the remains in a trash bag.
“These are very rare circumstances that do not happen very often, so we understand the importance and the rarity of this circumstance. So to say I’m not in shock with the outcome I think would be understating it a little bit,” Carroll County Sheriff Kevin Kemp told the outlet.
Kemp hadn’t even gone to the police academy yet when young Bowman disappeared, but said one of his first thoughts after discovering the remains was whether they could belong to the missing boy.
“It was a day where I first thought, ‘What if these could be the remains of Logan Bowman?’” Kemp told WSLS.
Several months after the remains were discovered, the famed Texas-based forensic genealogy company, Othram, began working to identify the remains.
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“We used forensics genome sequencing on the boy’s remains that were found. And they were found decades later, so you can imagine how much degradation was there,” Chief Development Officer Dr. Kristen Mittelman told WSLS.
Mittleman told the outlet she hoped the discovery would lead to further prosecution.
“It’s hard to prosecute a murder if you don’t have a body, because there’s always that doubt brought in,” she said.
After Bowman disappeared, his biological mother, Cynthia Davis, and her then-boyfriend Dennis Schermerhorn were charged in connection to his disappearance. Davis was convicted of secondary murder and sentenced to 15 years in prison. The charges against Schermerhorn were dismissed in 2004 for lack of evidence.
Kemp told WSLS it was too early to decide whether new charges would be filed, but a press release from the sheriff’s office said the investigation was ongoing “with new charges anticipated.”
“I want people to know that we don’t give up. And you may not know every little thing going on, it may be quiet for a little while, but this is proof that just because you don’t hear something every single week, it doesn’t mean there’s not work being done,” Kemp told WSLS.
“We’ll do everything we can to press whatever charges need to be pressed,” he added.